Thursday, December 9, 2010

Prezi an alternative to "death by power point"

IntroductionWeb based, can be used with a MAC or a PC. Presumably linux as well, but I have not tested that.Prezi is an interesting alternative to PowerPoint, and makes it easier to put together a non-linear exposition of material. What do I mean by this?It allows you to prepare a cloud of material for your class and , depending on the class’s progress giving them greater or lesser amount of it without looking as if you ran out of material, or looking as if you are skipping over slides.You can embed pictures, links to you tube clips etc.in your presentation. Your presentation can be up on the web for students to view at their leisure for revision etc.It is famous for stunning visual effects, zooming into the full stop of a sentence to reveal paragraphs of additional material, spinning your slides in from many directions etc. All this is set up in a very intuitive interface, the underlying model of which is that your presentation is all laid out on one large sheet which you zoom from place to place on looking at individual frames of the presentation. It is easy to set up multiple paths through the slides.Down sides. I does not have the presentation features which allow you to build a stand alone presentation for self paced learning with built in quizzes that PowerPoint does and it does not yet allow you to package your presentation with a narration.Any time you use it at least half the questions, in my experience, tend to be about the presentation tool rather than the content of your talk.Prezi is available here:Prezi Web SiteEducational use.A more flexible presentation tool than power point, with novelty value.Further reading:There is a collection of educational PREZI’s on this web site:Link hereURLhttp://edu.prezi.com/AppendixSaving a copy of a prezi for offline presentationLog into your page on the Prezi websiteopen the Prezi that you wish to save.On the right hand side you will see a button labeled Download, click on this.A small window now opens up headed Choose a Format to DownloadSelect the first option which isExport to Portable Prezi and click the download buttonThe Prezi now downloads as a zip fileWhen you open this there will be a folder with the name of your Prezi. open this and you will find a file called prezi.exe When you run this your Prezi opens.Getting Audio into PreziWe assume you have an audio file as an mp3 which you want to put into your prezi to play at some point in your presentation. The following method should workPrezi does not have the capability to run audio only, so the first step is to convert the audio file into a movie!The simplest way to do this on a PC is to use movie maker.Open movie maker and start a new project.Then import a picture which will be on screen while the audio plays.Next select "import audio or music" and import your sound track.Now we save it from movie maker, where the format I chose was small image and the extension is.wmvMy project is now written to disk as TestTalkForPrezi.wmvThe next step we have to do is convert this to the video format Prezi likes, which has an extension .FLV.To do this we use an online converter which is calledzamzaryou can use it from hereZamzar web site.The site is very simple with numbered steps 1,2,3. There is a free option which works fine.You upload the movie to the Zamzar site, then select the format you want to convert it to, in our case .FLV, and after you put in your email address zamzar will send you a link to the converted movie.This can take a little while, I’ve just run a test file through the system and it took about a half hour.You now download the file by following the link in the email and you are ready to go to preziOpen up Prezi,Choose insert file, and then your file and after a short time you are up and running